Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria is the latest concoction thought up by pseudo scientists of the religious Reich. A boogieman scare tactic aimed at parents who support their trans-kids right to medically transition prior to puberty or young enough to grow up as a member of the sex/gender they identify as being.

File with Climate Change Denial.

BTW As a pioneer I am very pleased to see brilliant folks like Julia Serano, picking up the torch and moving the struggle forward. Being an elder means knowing when to let others take over.

As a biologist, I’ve always been fascinated by Hollywood’s tendency to portray science laboratories as being filled with test tubes and flasks full of various colored liquids. I’ve worked in research laboratories for most of my adult life, and I’ve used all sorts of liquids and solutions in my experiments, but they were almost always clear. Seriously, most liquids and solutions are clear! So what’s up with all those gratuitous shots of beakers with boiling blue liquid in them? Well, most people don’t know much about science, so it seems exotic to them. And colored liquids also seem exotic, and therefore “science-ish” in many laypeople’s minds. Even though such depictions are not rooted in actual science.

“Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria” (ROGD) also seems science-ish on the surface. After all, it’s a four-word technical-sounding term — seriously, who but scientists would have come up with such an esoteric-sounding name?! And I can easily imagine how laypeople who may have come across this term in The Globe and Mail, National Post, or National Review (all of which have recently published ROGD op-eds) might mistake this for an authentic medical condition or diagnosis, even though it is not rooted in actual science.

So for those unfamiliar with this term and curious as to what it’s all about, I have put together this handy primer.

Who invented the term Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria?

Zinnia Jones from Gender Analysis has written twoexcellent articles chronicling the origins of the phrase “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.” Basically, it originated in July 2016 on three blogs (4thwavenow.com, Transgendertrend.com, and YouthTransCriticalProfessionals.org) that have a history of promoting anti-transgender propaganda. The term was intended to explain some parents’ observations that 1) their children came out as transgender seemingly suddenly, often during puberty, and 2) their children also had trans-identified peers and interacted with trans-themed social media. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon for reluctant parents to presume that their child has adopted a trans (or LGBTQ+ more generally) identity as a result of undue influence from other children and/or outside sources — hence the recurring accusations about transgender agendas, peer pressure, and trans identities supposedly being “trendy.” ROGD takes this presumption one step further: It asserts that any gender dysphoria these adolescents experience represents an entirely new phenomenon that is wholly distinct from the gender dysphoria that transgender people have historically experienced (e.g., as described in the DSM-5, the WPATH Standards of Care, and many decades of past research).

While ROGD is scientifically specious, the concept serves a very clear practical purpose. It provides reluctant parents with an excuse to disbelieve and disaffirm their child’s gender identity, under the presumption that it is merely a by-product of ROGD. It also provides a rationale for restricting their child’s interactions with transgender peers and access to trans-related information, as such things are the imagined cause of the condition.

In addition to these parental motivations, ROGD provides political cover for those who wish to rollback trans rights and healthcare. For instance, anti-trans groups can cite ROGD as a rationale for excluding trans kids and censoring trans-related media and resources (under the presumption that these things are causing ROGD in other children), and limiting or eliminating the ability to transition (under the presumption that some kids who seek this out are merely ROGD, and/or because ROGD is a brand new medical condition that will require years of further study). And if anyone objects to such measures, these ROGD proponents can conveniently claim that they are not anti-trans — after all, they acknowledge the existence of transgender people and gender dysphoria! (in some cases, at least) — it’s just that they are acting primarily out of concern for “ROGD kids.”

Let’s be honest: Despite his reputation as a maverick, John McCain spent most of his last decade being a very orthodox Republican, toeing the party line no matter how irresponsible it became. Think of the way he abandoned his onetime advocacy of action to limit climate change.

But he redeemed much of that record with one action: He cast the crucial vote against G.O.P. attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. That single “nay” saved health care for tens of millions of Americans, at least for a while.

But now McCain is gone, and with him, as far as we can tell, the only Republican in Congress with anything resembling a spine. As a result, if Republicans hold Congress in November, they will indeed repeal Obamacare. That’s not a guess: It’s an explicit promise, made by Vice President Mike Pence last week.

But what about the problems that sank the repeal effort in 2017? Surely Republicans have spent the past year rethinking their policy ideas, trying to come up with ways to undo the A.C.A. without inflicting enormous harm on ordinary Americans, especially those with pre-existing medical conditions. Right?

See, I made a joke.

Of course, Republicans haven’t rethought their ideas on health care (or, actually, anything else). Partly that’s because the modern G.O.P. doesn’t do policy analysis. Democrats have a network of think tanks and sympathetic independent experts who look hard at evidence, try to devise solutions to real problems and sometime affect actual legislative proposals. Republicans have nothing comparable; their tame “experts” are basically in the business of saying whatever their political masters want to hear.

In the case of health care, however, there’s an even deeper problem: The G.O.P. can’t come up with an alternative to the Affordable Care Act because no such alternative exists. In particular, if you want to preserve protection for people with pre-existing conditions — the health issue that matters most to voters, including half of Republicans — Obamacare is the most conservative policy that can do that. The only other options are things like Medicare for all that would involve moving significantly to the left, not the right.

Health economists have explained this point many times over the years; but as always, it’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it. Still, let’s try one more time.

If you want private insurers to cover people with pre-existing conditions, you have to ban discrimination based on medical history. But that in itself isn’t enough, because if policies cost the same for everyone, those who sign up will be sicker than those who don’t, creating a bad risk pool and forcing high premiums. That was the case in New York, where premiums for individual policies were very high before the A.C.A. — and promptly fell by half when Obamacare went into effect.

In the mid-1960s, young African, Hispanic, Native, and Caucasian American activists became a driving force for civil rights, free speech, and academic freedom. In manifestos, conferences, and teach-ins, young Americans also opposed the Vietnam War, capitalism, and racism; some eventually became willing to use violence. The mainly male leaders fought about socialism versus communism, totalitarianism versus democratic socialism, and whether Soviet Russia or the United States was more to blame for the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. However, the quarrelsome male socialists, Black Power, Native, and Latino activists shut most women out of significant roles in these debates. In 1965 and 1966, many male movement leaders expected women to make them coffee, do the typing and mimeographing, and provide sex.

As feminist ideas gained currency, women on the left refused to be treated in this way. They began drafting manifestos of their own, which were treated with contempt. Some men also humiliated the women. When Marilyn Webb, a member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), tried to speak about women’s liberation, the men yelled: “Take her off the stage and fuck her.”

SDS morphed into the Weather Underground. Bill Ayers, Kathy Boudin, Bernardine Dohrn, and Mark Rudd, among many others, began a program of bombing commercial and government buildings and robbing banks. They held up a Brink’s armored car and killed a police officer. Some blew themselves up by accident. Survivors went underground.

The FBI spied on the Weather Underground as well as on Martin Luther King’s nonviolent civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, and SDS. Weirdly, the FBI also infiltrated nonviolent feminist groups and collectives; informers and agents provocateurs filed reports that many of us later obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The FBI had been scouring hippie and lesbian feminist communities in its search for radical left-wing female fugitives. They found no one. Then, in 1974, the Weather Underground fugitive Jane Alpert, who had been in touch with Robin Morgan at Ms. magazine, surfaced voluntarily and met with the FBI. Jane was ready to denounce male leftists. She’d become a feminist.

All hell broke loose.

In 1969 Jane had participated in eight bombings of commercial and government buildings in New York City. These bombs led to no deaths or injuries.

She was sentenced to 27 months in jail. Soon after, the FBI arrested five more fugitives, all feminists with whom Jane had lived or traveled. Robin defended Jane by blaming some of the newly arrested women for not taking proper precautions.

Jane had one wish before she went to jail: She wanted to meet the feminists whose work she’d been reading. We gathered in Kate Millett’s loft. When Jane arrived, Flo Kennedy and Ti-Grace Atkinson exited noisily and in a rage. They believed that Jane had named names and was therefore responsible for the arrest of one of her former underground comrades and for the imprisonment of several feminists.

In 1974, Ms. published Jane’s ode to “Mother Right,” which Gloria Steinem introduced. “Mother right” was a “new feminist theory” that claimed that women are naturally nurturing and compassionate caregivers, biologically different from, and superior to, patriarchal men, who wage war against each other and against women, whom they victimize.

At the time I wanted to believe that this theory could be true. But if it was, how to explain women’s cruelty to children, men, and each other?

Robin had formed a “Circle of Support” for Jane that divided the feminist movement in an ugly way: Either you believed in a matriarchy or you didn’t; either you believed in class warfare or you didn’t; either you were against the government or you were for it; either you sympathized with Jane and Robin or you viewed them as traitors.

Feminists had already fought about whether class warfare against the system or reform of the system would free most women. We had fought about whether lesbianism and identity politics were the cutting edge of feminism or the most reactionary, narcissistic, and self-defeating of positions. White feminists berated themselves constantly because women of color were not with us in droves. Some of us made genuine overtures to try to interest women of color in joining us; others made only token efforts. While there were many important individual exceptions, most feminists of color chose to fight for women’s rights with other women of color or for racial-minority rights with both men and women of color.

Jane and Robin were supported by Gloria, whom Robin had persuaded to back Jane’s position by having Gloria introduce Jane’s article and giving it prime space in Ms. This led to a great division among feminists. It prepared us to believe the worst about each other: it unleashed demons, exposed fault lines, and was the training ground for what later came to be known as the great feminist sex wars about pornography, prostitution, and censorship. As I said at the time, the FBI could have saved taxpayers money by leaving us alone: Feminists did not need agents to do us in. We did a pretty good job of that ourselves.